


And These Strange Waters

by girl_wonder



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The secrets that Tia Dalma gives are not gifts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And These Strange Waters

Tia Dalma tells her secrets to men that enter and leave her life like the tide. Some would say that she loved these men.

Her mother, far smarter than her, would say that she loved these men, but not like they loved the sea. Rolling Tia's rough hair between her hands, her mother would say, "You can'na love a man the way these men love the sea. We don' have that type 'a love in us, girl."

So, Tia Dalma told her secrets to these men, these men who she shared her bed with, who she shared her wisdom with, but she told them in small pieces so that only if they got together would they hear the story under her whispering.

These men would fit together like puzzle pieces because of a story she'd dropped in their ears, and nature, who likes puzzles and random meetings above all things, would push them together.

The first piece of her story she told to a young man, an explorer who'd taken a wrong turn somewhere and arrived at her mother's house. The light of her swamp did not turn his hair colors, it turned it to the lack of color, black, and only later would she learn it was brown, bleached by the salt and the sea.

He collapsed into her mother's arms and gasped. The men behind him, in his small lifeboat, were all corpses, all half-souls wanting both the afterlife and the taste of life back on their tongue. Her mother stared at them, souls half out of their bodies, trying to crawl back in, and she handed the man over to Tia Dalma, said, "These boys be needin' me more'n that one. You take 'im."

Until her mother died, at a hundred and fifty four, she called Tia, "girl." When she visited after her death, she called Tia, "woman," in a strange trance way, as though by saying it she'd call to life in Tia the very nature of being one.

Tia had put the boy on their vine-grown sick bed, watched his face in the lamplight. Their room swung like a cabin on a calm sea, and she kissed his forehead before gathering up herbs.

"Oh, girl," her mother said, men dealt with and her own skin white from paint, the patterns of spells flaking off like chalk. "This man, he'll take your heart and make you cry."

Tia had looked down at him, sweating through the worst of it, compress heavy on his forehead, chest bare and drawn on with squid ink. "No man'll ever take my heart."

Her mother had smiled, a half quirk of a smile and shaken her head. That day, her mother took a needle to Tia's flesh and gave her her first marking, a black circle between her breasts to guard against heartbreak.

When he woke, he was clear eyed and he looked at her, where she was bent over him in their poorly lit sitting room.

"I saw death," he said, a croak that ate at his words, leaving them empty. She stroked his throat, fingers leaving traces of ash against his yellow skin.

"Davey Jones ain't got no use for an innocent like you," she said, tilting her head until she was looking at the corner of his mouth. His lips twitched. "Ain't funny that the strongest man o' da sea don' want'ya soul."

"Davey Jones isn't real," he sighed.

She slapped a hand over his mouth, his lips small and thin, moving beneath her palm.

"Don't you be a liar now." She clipped the words and moved back, even when he reached out desperately to try and catch her. His fingers wanted her but his voice was gone; she had it in her pocket, would keep it until he wouldn't bring lies into her house.

She shook him off, pressing a hand on the circle between her breasts.

After three days, he grew used to his lack and began signing. Her mother stayed on the porch, knitting and unknitting like Penelope waiting for her husband to come home. Her mother was married to the king of hell and Tia would rather he never set foot near her again, but her mother was a stubborn woman who had promised him she'd wait.

So, she knit and clucked her tongue and said, "Boy, who'd you go an' make angry to have your voice stolen like that."

But it wasn't a question, because Tia kept his voice in a whalebone box under her bed, wrapped in a worn piece of silk that she usually kept her cards in. His voice was the color of the sun as it first hit the ocean, not quite done yet, but falling into darkness anyway. When she held it up to her ear, she knew that someday he would command men with that voice, but he'd suck away the fight in it, the urge the sun had to stay above the line of water.

He would say things like, _That will be all, ensign_. He would say, _Take him to the brig_. He would whip men.

She blew on his voice as though it was an ember, but it didn't brighten, just sagged more, lost more of its luster and she eventually shook her head, put it back in the whalebone box, and locked it with a whalebone key that she kept tucked in her hair with the other pieces of riffraff she collected.

Without a voice, he only had the name that she gave him and she listened to his voice and began calling him, 'James.'

She took him out with her to gather things from their swamp, her skirt tucked up between her legs like pants.

He stared at her ankles the first time he saw them and she said, "James," and he blushed.

Outside, she imagined that women didn't show their ankles. Or maybe she had especially pretty ones.

While they gathered, she talked, and she told him the first bit of her story, small little fragile secrets that weren't any deeper than a hunting crane skimming the surface of the water. She told him that she was born of a woman and a man and she whispered the name of her mother's lover into his ear to see if he knew the mortal name her father carried. He looked blank and pulled out the cross he wore around his neck.

"No, James," she said, and looked up into the trees where a crow made the low sounds of strangulation. "They weren' married."

Under her fingers, his skin was warm and he blushed a brilliant color when she kissed him. Cautiously, he went down on one knee, looking hopeful and ashamed. She knew what he wanted to do to her in the dark and almost said, 'yes' so that he could touch her there, could press her hard into her bed with his warm flesh and innocent eyes. Instead she shook her head and drew him back home.

She opened the whalebone box, unwrapped the silk and slid his voice between her lips, held it on her tongue like a spider. The spider struggled to get out, legs poking and tickling, crunching when she pressed it firmly to the roof of her mouth.

Then she walked out into their front room and kissed him, thrust her tongue into his mouth and gave him back his voice, a momma spider, belly heavy with eggs, that crawled back into her web inside his throat to lay them.

That night he tipped his hat at her, at her mother and took the lifeboat back towards the ocean. His eyes were lowered and shamed when he said goodbye. She pressed a thumb to his forehead, rubbed a smear of dirt there. A gift, maybe or a curse. His eyes would always be open when the woman he wanted to marry did not love him.

Neither she nor her mother expected him to return.

*****

Her father was the next man who flowed in, shirtless and dark, chest slick with oil. He wore a sailor's pants and her mother stopped her knitting, looked up into his eyes and said, "You come back."

Tia hid in the shadows of their reading room, face guarded. She whispered her father's name as a curse.

He looked at her, and his eyes were as deep as the sea, as loveless as the sky. He shook his head, said, "Tia Dalma."

And then he was in front of her, before she could even blink, flickering in and out like a candle. She bared her teeth and he held her chin in his hands. His touch burned.

"What' your secret," he asked.

"He collects 'em," her mother said, needles clicking.

"I won' ever love a man," Tia said.

Her father laughed, the type of laughter that itched up under someone's skin, like a rash. "No, girl, you won'."

That night with the sound of waves crashing, her mother screaming, and the monkeys shrieking, Tia Dalma ran away from home.

*****

In Tortuga, she was not strange, although her skin was darker than the other girls'. She didn't ever spread her legs like a whore, but she did read.

Her cards said, "This one will do great things." Her bird bones said, "This one will die on his next voyage."

She said, "You have work ahead of you."

Her voice here was unusual, slow and calm like the swamp, swallowed men down with its sound. They lived with the sea as the voice they listened to and she gave them a new woman's voice in their ears, low and paced like life in calm waters. She never asked if they felt the same panic listening to her voice as they did when their ship lost wind.

The boys that she lied to went out from her shop and did her work for her. In payment they brought back wild and magical things. They brought her dark things, a tooth from a dragon, a scale from a sea snake. She gave them lies in return, pretty lies that they would live and love and win fortune.

She kept their pieces in her jars, carried those around her neck so that when she moved, they made hollow and hopeless sounds. They made the sounds of a sailor's death on land.

Everyone knew that you shouldn't trust a girl like her, gypsy of the water the way that a pirate couldn't be. Sailors believed in superstition. Women like her made superstition real.

She took in a woman who was heavy with child and let that woman stay above her shop. The woman paid her in cleaning, paid her in touch.

When the baby came, it was a boy and Tia whispered into its ear, "Chil', yo' love will love you back like the rain love' the ocean. She'll know yo' true name even when you don'. M' baby pirate."

The woman who was staying with her screamed and beat at Tia, cursed her for giving her son any gifts that Tia had to give. The woman packed hastily, and left on the first boat back to England.

That night, Tia slipped away, not out of shame but out of pain. She missed her own mother.

*****

Her mother was the same. Tia's father was gone now, for years and her mother nodded as though Tia was coming back with the gathering, not ten years later.

"He make you with chil'?" Tia asked.

Tia's mother nodded towards their reading room and Tia saw the white thing in a jar of seawater. The jars that her mother carried didn't fit around her neck no more. They were too heavy, too many. Her mother only carried the heaviest clutched close, like a monkey climbing with a sick baby.

Because she could, Tia took down the baby and emptied the water back into the swamp, fireflies the only vigil her baby brother would get. His eyes were open, dark and deep like her father's. Her mother had no business keeping the dead thing, baby soul stuck in, confused why its flesh was cold, why its mother was distant.

"Baby brother, you be the only flesh I'll ever know as my own," she whispered to him. It was a secret, that. No child could grow in her belly. No baby would look back at Tia with Tia's own eyes.

She set up the fire on the land, and her mother came at her just as she threw her baby brother on it, swaddled in white silk and red cotton. With nails and a banshee scream, her mother came at her clawing at Tia's skin, leaving deep bleeding grooves in Tia's back. Her mother scratched at Tia's face, getting in one swipe like an alley cat in Tortuga before Tia shoved her off, a swift backhand she'd learned from a sailor-captain.

Maybe her mother fought like an alley-cat with kittens, but Tia fought like the witch her mother'd raised her to be, swamp mud sticking between her toes. She elbowed her mother's stomach and slid around her until her mother had to kneel, one of Tia's arms wrapped around her neck.

Her mother was choking from air, from being so close to the smell of burning flesh, and Tia made her watch the thing that she'd made with Tia Dalma's father burn.

Spirit cried when it left, and it had no Christian holy-blessing, but it had a rosary of swamp-vine wrapped around it's neck and if God didn't want her baby brother, then Tia's father could take him.

Her mother cried into her arms on that swamp bank like her soul went with the baby and maybe it did, because when Tia Dalma's father showed up again, Tia sat outside their house and turned him away.

"No room for your kind of wicked in this house no more," she said to him.

His smile was the sliver that she saw in her own smile. He was candle light again and suddenly he was in front of her, towering over her large and male like a man should be. He kissed her, hot burning candlewax on her lips and she cried in pain, but not fear.

Girls who know the devil's their daddy don't have no room for fear in their tears.

Her father left her her second ink, his hand on the back of her neck, like a slave-master's yoke. Later, she'd try to scrub it off with sand, until she realized it wasn't filth, wasn't ash either, but was under her skin.

She said, "Don' come back."

He said, "Chil', you think I ever left?"

They both smiled the same, then, a painful thing to know.

Her mother didn't get up from the bed until she died.

*****

Bootstrap come to her for his child's fortune.

He said, "I want to know what you gave my boy, witch."

"I don' give your boy a single thing he don' already have," Tia said. "And I don' give you nothin', _Bootstrap_."

She shook the bones in her cup and dumped them onto the table. Didn't even need to look at them to know what they read.

"You goin' to hell, Bootstrap," she said. "An' not even the kin' the devil run, neither. You gonna be a sailor for the only man the devil don' like."

He shuddered, and sat across from her. "And my son?"

Unlike her own, Bootstrap was a good father, a man that she thought would want the best for his child. She looked down at the bones. They spoke to her, the voices sharp and high like a baby bird screaming for food from its mother. She leaned closer, because they'd never sounded so desperate before. They were making the same sounds that they had right before she'd picked up their dead bodies off of the water surface and skinned them for their bones.

They sounded afraid. They sounded hopeful.

Dead birds don' have no right to be hopeful.

She looked at Bootstrap and said, "Your son, he won' be with you, but he'll hate you more than you love him."

He nodded, like this was expected. She hated him even more for that, so she told him the next piece of her story, a small one, something that she wasn't saving for a man she cared about.

"I can hear the birds' voices when they're dead," she said.

He paled and left, maybe knowing it was a curse, even if he didn't know exactly what she'd given him.

From her rocking chair on her porch, she watched him row away, his strokes weak and uncertain for a man who knew the sea better than he knew his wife. Afternoon light flashed off the water, sparks and ripples that looked like flames.

*****

If she was surprised that Jack Sparrow came to her, she didn't look it. For four days, she made him stay in the water, until tiny fish mouths had eaten away all the flesh from his bones, until when she reached down, arm shoulder deep in the water, she only felt his bones, smooth like ivory.

"Tia, love," he said. "This is a little absurd."

She left the prisoner's weight shackled around his ankles, as though he was a man sent to Davey Jone's Locker, only her swamp was shallow and Davey Jones had no rule here any more than her father did.

On the fifth day, she sat on the pier and slid out of her skirts, pulled off her white sailor's shirt, and then dropped herself into the water like a mermaid. She unlocked the manacles from his ankles and pulled herself back up, taking her payment from the cage of his bare ribs. He watched her put his heart on the pier.

"Won't I be needing that?" He looked about as nervous as he ever did, and corrected himself almost too slow, "Tia, love."

"'m not your love, Jack Sparrow," she said, crawling up next to his heart, water slick, making her skin feel unclean. She put on her shirt and skirts and they stuck to her wet skin, clinging. The swamp was sweat-warm, like a bed after sex.

Unconcerned with modesty, she watched his bare bones climb up, head and braids the only part of him left. He looked at his hand, finger bones fine and fragile.

"Tia," he said, in warning. "Man can live without his heart, but he can't live without his skin."

She laughed and picked a leach off of the beating organ, dropping it on the pier and crushing with her callus-thick heel. Then she pocketed his heart; it made a red stain on the white apron spreading through her black skirt, spreading Jack's blood over her legs. He lunged at her, thin bones making a musical sound when they clattered together. His joints sounded dangerously dry.

Batting away his hands she drew him back towards the land, half a step at a time; he moved dangerous. Maybe he'd realized whose daughter he was dealing with when he'd made his bargain, but she knew that none of her men had ever _known_ what the difference was between her and the fake card readers of Tortuga.

"I want my skin back, savvy?" he said, lunging again. They were on the bank of the swamp and it felt familiar to her, like coming home.

This time, Tia didn't pull her punch and Jack went down hard without the benefit of skin and muscle and fat. She whispered and felt the power of her swamp in her bare feet, such a deep feeling and nothing like the feeling of crushing a leach under her foot. Difference between a wave and a tsunami.

The muck, the mud, the swamp sucked down his bones, and he struggled out, but Tia whispered again and it sucked him down again. The second time he struggled out, he was wiping the muck off of his skin.

It took him a minute.

"Tia-"

"Not your love," she interrupted, turning around. "Jack Sparrow thinks that he wants a compass."

He stayed with her until he'd grown back fully, swamp born skin and muscle taking a while to like his bones. Jack's bones were not as inviting as the swamp, they were not warm and the blood that beat in his veins was _hungry_.

Of all the men she's ever met, Jack yearned for the sea in a way that swamp mud couldn't understand. Swamp was land and water, the mixing of both, a warm place of comfort and danger in slow, still waters.

Jack was a storm, windy, intense, and endlessly hungry for more. He would consume her if she was a weaker woman, but if she was a weaker woman, he wouldn't have come to her like this. If she was a weaker woman, he wouldn't have needed anything from her, and they both knew it.

"I'll be back, love," he assured, his precious compass clutched close. "Tia."

Too many women had fallen to his smile, but Tia had tasted the devil's lips on hers and she knew it would take more than the flash of gold in a smile to win her.

His heart beat lazy in her pocket. She didn't bother waving him off, but did toss a necklace of crocodile teeth at him. He caught it, because a man like Jack Sparrow took favors from women like her. The intensity of his desire made him blind to the dangers of gifts like the ones that she gave.

"Gonna tell you a secret, Jack Sparrow," she said.

"I'd love to hear it, but the tide's going out and I wouldn't want to miss the-"

She reached into her pocket and squeezed his heart. He clutched his chest and came towards her.

"That was unnecessary," he said, but waited, watching her with eyes shaded with her own kohl.

"As long as I live, I'll be a curse to men. Always a curse to hear your fate before the cards are dealt. I'll live as young as I am now 'til I die." She tapped the circle her mother had drawn between her breasts. "That be a gift my father gave me."

"Course you will," Jack said cheerfully, and she was glad that he had this piece of her story because he would never connect the stars and hear what she hadn't said. She'd live this young for her whole life and that would be as long as the stars spun, as long as sailors romanced the ocean.

Jack had one foot in his boat again, and he left on the noon tide, not knowing what was waiting for him. Tia didn't use all of her curses at once and the island he had in his future was one that she saved him from knowing ahead of time.

*****

The last was not a man at all, and maybe that's why the circle her mother marked did no good.

The next was Anamaria, bold as the sea and strong as the wind. Her boat came to the dock and she knocked on Tia Dalma's door, hat in her hands.

From her, Tia demanded the payment of a kiss, the kiss from a woman who loved salt dried wood and sun on canvas. Tia demanded a kiss from someone who'd only loved one other woman before she kissed Tia Dalma and that woman was no woman at all, but the blue-green feel of a woman who cradled ships to her breasts and sailors to her soul.

Anamaria came asking for a ship, but didn't know that that wasn't what she wanted at all. First Tia taught her how to wear men's pants and boots and how to color her eyes with kohl so that no one would forget that Anamaria would understand the flashes of irrational rage that the sea showed better than any man ever could.

When Tia went to gather things from the swamp, Anamaria came with her, footsteps more careful than Tia Dalma's because the deck of a ship was solid and Tia's swamp was dangerous ground.

Tia tucked her skirt up like pants and Anamaria didn't stare at her ankles, but instead at the corner of her jaw. The kiss that she pressed there was sweet, gentle, one hand playing at the knot that Tia's skirt made.

Their skin was blessed by the swamp's soil, like a baptism in filth. Her fingers traced wounds that Anamaria would get, wounds that she wouldn't get, wounds that she'd wish she'd gotten. Marking in a way that only fate could see. Fate who said that love like Tia felt would never get anywhere because it was a love for stories and for songs.

It was the type of love that wouldn't last as soon as they washed off the scent of it, because Anamaria smelled of the sea, salty and fresh and Tia Dalma smelled like the swamp, death and rotting inherent.

Slowly, Tia realized that she kept Anamaria here, teaching her things the girl already knew because there were secrets that Anamaria deserved not to be told, but probably would be anyway. She could never curse Anamaria like that, with a whisper of a story between their sheets, a few words shared between kisses.

Instead, she sent Anamaria away with a map and a gun, taking a lock of Anamaria's hair, twisted into a loop like a lover's tear.

She tucked that into a jar that hung from her ceiling. Her jars were all clear glass and were too many to carry on her back.

"I'll come back," Anamaria promised.

"Don' you dare," Tia Dalma said, staring at the way the jar, empty but for the curl.

She gave Anamaria a set of glass beads on a rough string. They'd reflect the sky back like the ocean, disguising her. The sky never set upon the sea with the same fury as it set upon sailors. Anamaria kissed Tia's wrist, where her veins showed.

That was a new place to mark with ink, but she waited until Anamaria was gone before taking out the needles.

*****

Barbossa was a gift from her father.

She sat on her porch, rocking back and forth, new water snake wrapped around her wrist, climbing up her arm, while her father rowed them to land.

He delivered the dead man to her pier and made her come down for him. It was half a man, really, the potential of a man.

"Take care of him," her father ordered.

"For what," she said. "Ain't my promise that brought him back here."

"You wan' a promise, girl?" Laughing, her father turned away from her, back towards his boat.

"I wan' payment." The snake around her shoulder hissed at her father, tongue flicking out quickly. "Nursin' a dead man back to health ain' easy work."

"Ain' hard for your kind, neither, chil'." He turned towards her, darkening her swamp merely by being there. Even the fireflies fled.

"My home," she said, firmly. "My rules. I wan' another soul, for the keepin'."

To escape her father, she didn't want to think about what Barbossa had bartered. But, that was his problem.

Laughing again, her father said, "Whose?"

"First promise," she said, arms crossed in front of her chest.

Although her father's teeth were white, his smile was frightening, like seeing a dead bird in the white bed sheets.

"I promise, chil'." He flickered until he was in front of her.

The snake shied and slid to hid in her clothes, cool skin flexing as it crawled down her arm. "Anamaria's. I wan' her soul when she goes."

Her father cupped her face, said, "Chil', you say your heart don' be needin' another."

Fighting off the shiver, she said, "You promise'."

Her father was a man of his word, but that didn't mean that he was kind about it, "You momma, she say, 'hello.'"

Tia Dalma shuddered, and her father blinked out, leaving his boat behind. Before dragging the dead man up to her house, she unwrapped the rope and pushed it off with one foot so that it floated deeper into the swamp.

Later, when Barbossa was in the sick bed, she worked.

"You ready for my price, dead man?" she asked him, coating his skin with swamp mud, an inch at a time.

He was just alive enough to listen when she leaned in to whisper into his ear. He wasn't alive enough to scream.

*****

end


End file.
